Today on The Black World Today there is a photograph that is purported to be of American soldiers in Iraq raping and sodomizing a woman. I won't bother linking to it for reasons of pruient interest, but the photograph appears staged to me. Not that I think it is beyond the realm of possibility that it could happen, but the timing of the photograph of a rape by American soldiers just seems too convenient.

But if you look at the pictures that have come out of Abu Ghraib they can only be described as pornography in its most repulsive and repugnant form. With the exception of the man threatened with electrocution if he stepped off the box, virtually every other image is one of nudity, simulated acts of rape and sexual humiliation.

A woman ties a noose around a naked man's neck and forces him to crawl across the floor. Uniformed people strip a group of hooded men, then laboriously assemble them into a pyramid. Men are forced to masturbate and simulate fellatio. In the past few days, we have all participated in the pornographic gaze. The sight of wide-eyed, grinning young men and women posing in front of their stripped and degraded captives has proved profoundly shocking. These snapshots tell us more than we may perhaps want to know about our society's heart of darkness.

This festival of violence is highly pornographic. The victims have been reduced to exhibitionist objects or anonymous "meat". They either wear hoods, or are beheaded by the camera. The people taking the photographs exult in the genitals of their victims. There is no moral confusion here: the photographers don't even seem aware that they are recording a war crime. There is no suggestion that they are documenting anything particularly morally skewed. For the person behind the camera, the aesthetic of pornography protects them from blame.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1211411,00.html

For years feminists and anti-pornography advocates have said that pornography dehumanizes both it's participants and its patrons. In the photos from the prison both the features and the genitalia of the Iraqi prisoners are blurred and obscured. The sado-sexual theme of the photos looks like outtakes from a particularly amateurish video tape. In the Arab world it is considered humiliating for a man to be naked around other men. Now add to that the humiliation of a white woman dragging around a Arab man on a leash or making mocking comments while pointing at their exposed genitalia and it starts to become clear why so many Islamic clerics describe the West as a den of degenerates.

If you've ever watched an episode of HBO's prison series, OZ, then what happened at Abu Ghraib looks like just another day at the office.

Pornography is typically the exploitation of women by men for the enjoyment of men. Male porn exists, but even then it's primary audience is still men. In Abu Ghraib the tables have been turned and it's the males whom are exploited, posed in degrading positions and turned into so much "meat."

Are we upset and disgusted in part because it's men whom are being humiliated?

Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls ... it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity - Andrea Dworkin

The question for debate is:

Are the photographs and images coming out of Abu Ghraib an example of pornography with men as the sexual objects?

Not at all. The intention is entirely different, as is the effect.
The torture of those prisoners was not intended to be arousing to viewers of those photographs, the sexual element in the abuse seems pretty clearly designed to psychologically harm the prisoners (who are, after all, fundamentalist Muslims), and to make the victims less likely to report the abuse.

The participants in pornography are involved willingly, there is a world of difference between pornography and what happened at Abu Ghraib.

Are the photographs and images coming out of Abu Ghraib an example of pornography with men as the sexual objects?

Grendel did a fine job sumerizing my thoughts on this.

Are we upset and disgusted in part because it's men whom are being humiliated?

Can you imagine how much more the American public or the world population for that matter would have been disgusted had we seen this abuse against women?

It's no Anne Rice Sleeping Beauty novel in there. We haven't reached a critical point because the detainees we've seen so far are men. It's bad enough there are allegations of a sodomized teenage boy. But he is still male. The public can tell itself that somehow, someway, he deserves to be there. He aided the enemy or conspired against us. You can demonize him. If the picture of the boy surfaces it will still be very hard on the public. But, I think, the public has a harder time talking itself out of the emotional charge that a female victim conjures.

Maybe I misunderstood your question but it's rather sad. Shouldn't we be as upset? I don't like to even think I'm being archaic but if men are treated this way, what are the chances of women being taken advantage of?

Are the photographs and images coming out of Abu Ghraib an example of pornography with men as the sexual objects?

"Pornography" in their case is a means to an end. I doubt, with the exception of sexual assault, the MPs & interrogators got their jollies off in a sexual sense.

I'm too bog a fan of pornography (see Grendel's argument) to consider this type of abuse as "pornographic" - but it is most certainly obscene. As has been pointed out, pornography consists of willing participants - and these men were anything but. Indeed, I suspect that the fact that they were being photographed - and knew they were being photographed - was part of the humiliation. The media, then, by publicizing the photos to the extent that they have, are participating in that humiliation - as are we who view them. The whole thing is an inhuman disgrace. But it is not pornography.

Are the photographs and images coming out of Abu Ghraib an example of pornography with men as the sexual objects?

Perhaps, but not really.

What we are seeing today is much the same as every other such image, whether it be photographs of dead Jews stacked in piles at Dachau or wood cuts of the horrors inflicted by the Catholics against the Protestants in Holland. Pregnant women impaled on spikes, babies roasted on spits.

It can all be used as pornography if your degraded enough to want it, but in the end, its just yet another testimony to the depths of depair that authority sends those who don't understand what it is.

As human beings we are fascinated even whilst we are repulsed. How many of us can ignore the spectacle of a car crash? I don't believe this is pornography. Its just our curious nature conflicing with our aspirations of civilisation.

I've seen my share of porn too Wertz so I have to take issue with you on the part about pornography consisting only of willing participants. The worst and most vile form of porn is child pornography and there's never been a "willing particpant" in that kind of garbage.

Additionally, what's the statue of limitations on being a willing particpant. Would a suburban soccer mom who has a nice family and life want to be reminded of what she did to pay her tuition back in college by making a dirty movie or posing nude? I doubt it!

The same applies to those men in Abu Gharib. How many of them who were not convicted of any crime will go home to families with a guilty secret shame to carry for the rest of their lives?

In it's basest and ugliest form, pornography does not merely titillate. It can debase and dehumanize as well. That's the kind of ugliness that I'm talking about that is on display in those pictures from the prison.

I don't want to derail this into a discussion of pornography and its various definitions (though it would make an interesting debate elsewhere).

Suffice to say that I agree entirely that the photos in question are base and ugly - and, further, that they were specifically intended to debase and dehumanize as well. But I would still not, on those grounds, classify them as pornographic. Granted, in some cases (like those you mention), pornography can be base and ugly - but not all that is base and ugly should be considered pornography. I'll stick to my assessment that they are obscene.

Nah, this isn't pornography. I've seen my share of pornographic materials of all types. You're only young, dumb, and with newsgroup access once in your life. In a way some of what I have viewed (pornographic and indecent (snuff videos)) has transmogrified me into the jaded pessimist I am today. I like to think I've seen it all, and quite frankly my "quest" to these videos and pictures was to view something that many do not, and wouldn't want to. I guess I'm compulsive in my nature in terms of how I wanted to find something to out-do that last something. Often I did. I won't tell why and how I stopped, as it's not necessary to the topic, but suffice it to say that I saw as much as I wanted to see. But all that aside, I reiterate that this is not pornography. It just happens that people are nude, but there is no sex. I don't think that they were created for sexual stimulation (I know I don't find them sexually stimulating) but are indecent in humiliating portrayal.

This is always what makes the definition of pornography so difficult because so many have different views of what makes something pornographic. As such, I try to stay away from ambiguity and dislike calling something pornography. In a way, I much prefer "Adult Entertainment" but the irony in that is I watched more "Adult Entertainment" as a non-adult than since becoming an adult!

Also, I have to think that "pornography" would consist of willing participants, as if not, then it's called ABUSE.

nighttimer:
Ya gotta do what you cotta do. I'm not going to judge her for it. Of course it's those with the "morality" that have to have their say. There is no statute of limitations on being that "willing participant" since we all have to do something to make ends meet on occasion. If she didn't have the foresight into seeing what could happen down the road, it is my opinion that she assumes all risks of that which she included herself.

nighttimer:
Sounds like you've seen your share of child pornography. (note the sarcasm. Making a statement like that, I gotta give you a hard time about it; it's my nature )

I think I've gotten enough off-topic already, so I'll leave with saying that these photos are not pornography.

In Sense #3 it is pornography: lurid or sensational material. While it cannot be proven that someone in a back room might be getting his jollies looking at the snapshots, it is abusive exploitation of the prisoners/detainees designed to produce shame of a sexual nature.





All of these words describe the abuse of prisoners that took place at Abu Ghraib.
I used the color red to emphasis especially pertinent descriptions.

Photographs of prisoners masturbating or performing fellatio on each other, whether real or not, are pornographic.

Supreme Court defines pornography basically as "Causes sexual thought with no artistic merit".

Sounds like every commercial on Television to me